Nader’s Blueprint

For nearly half a decade, Ralph Nader—lawyer, consumer advocate, winner of five-tenths-and-six-hundredths of one per cent of the popular vote in 2008—has been secretly working on his first novel, writing drafts and making edits on multiple Underwood Standard typewriters. Nader does not feel comfortable referring to the book as a novel, even though everything in it is made up. He says that the work belongs to a new genre, one that he calls “a practical utopia,” and defines as “a fictional vision that could become a new reality.” The book, called “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!,” is seven hundred and thirty-six pages long, and it contains dozens of characters, many of them real people—Warren Buffett, Barry Diller, and Ted Turner, among others—who act out Nader’s political fantasies. By the last page, most of the reforms that Nader has been arguing for all these years end up being enacted. Corporations are neutered. Third parties win. America is reborn.

A few weeks ago, Nader was working the phones in Washington, trying to reach the people he had fictionalized. “I feel that if I am going to do that to people, I want to give them all a heads up,” he said. “It’s been done to me, you know.” In the novel “Still Life with Woodpecker,” by Tom Robbins, published in 1980, Nader appears as the romantic obsession of a mythical princess (“She fell quickly asleep and dreamt of Ralph Nader”). Five years later, the science-fiction writer Greg Bear wrote “Eon,” which portrays Nader as “a saintly figure, a hero in a wasteland,” whose followers win landslide elections in North America and Western Europe (in 2011) and bring down the Soviet Union (in 2012). “You see, that’s science-fiction utopia,” Nader said. “Nobody can give that any credibility.”

Nader had reached about half of his characters. “A lot of them are hard to get,” he said. “Barry Diller is in Asia.” One billionaire was “a little snippy,” he said. Others were more amenable. Ted Turner sent a thank-you note. Phil Donahue, a lifelong admirer, was flattered. Yoko Ono, who in the book invents a logo called Seventh-Generation Eye that causes millions of people suddenly to shed their political apathy, sent Nader a brief reply. (“I think it is so sweet of you to write a book about somebody who resembles me. I don’t mind at all, of course. Does she look like a tiny dragon?”) Warren Beatty, whom Nader envisions running for governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger, and winning, with sixty-three per cent of the vote, blurbed the book. Nader, he wrote, was showing the world “how good he thinks things could be.”

Leonard Riggio, the chairman of Barnes & Noble, who is portrayed as an anti-corporate activist, funding protests across the country, was stumped. “I read a bit of it, and I said, ‘My God, what is this?’ ” he said. Robert Price, the son of Sol Price, a founder of Price Club, skimmed the sections of the book in which his father promotes industrial hemp and launches an attack on Wal-Mart that forces the company to unionize. “None of this connects at all,” he said.

A delicate call went to Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. Nader and Norquist are the political equivalent of matter and anti-matter—Nader’s career has been devoted to strengthening government, Norquist’s to eviscerating it—but the two maintain a friendly rivalry. “I like Ralph, and I have warm fuzzies for him on a number of levels,” Norquist said, recalling how he once invited Nader to one of his Wednesday strategy sessions. (“He was clearly traumatized,” he added.) In the book, Nader refers to those sessions as gatherings for the “greed and power brigades,” and fashions Norquist as the book’s principal villain, a conservative evil genius named Brovar Dortwist, who is defeated by a torrent of progressive campaigns, including a TV ad featuring a squawking parrot.

Norquist had not yet read the book. “He told me that I wouldn’t be too unhappy, because the character was principled,” Norquist said. He seemed to relish the role that Nader had given him in utopia. “I am all in favor of having the left win in fiction,” he said, but he wondered about the odd pseudonym. (“Brovar?” he asked. “Is that even a real name?”) As Norquist learned more about the details of his character, one could sense another budding novelist emerging. Brovar Dortwist owns a Doberman named Get’Em, and Norquist said, “I don’t like dogs. He should have checked. I used to have a six-foot-long red-tailed boa constrictor named Lysander Spooner—after the great nineteenth-century anarchist. We had him for most of the nineties, until my staff decided that he was large enough to eat a child.” ♦